Circa magazine review by David Trigg, circa 128, summer 2009

Allusion and metaphor abound in the work of Dublin-based photographer Dragana Jurisic. The suite of photographs comprising this modest yet compelling exhibition was originally commissioned by Irish statutory agency Combat Poverty to help raise awarness of poverty in Ireland. Poverty has long been a subject of the photographer’s gaze: Humphrey Spencer famously documented the social problems of 1930s London and similarly, in the 1970s, Exit Photography Group recorded life in the UK’s crumbling inner cities. But unlike these projects that faced poverty head on, Jurisic deftly skirts the issue, creating a poetic body of work that, in a refreshingly self-reflexive move, simultaneously evinces her uneasiness with the subject while questioning the photographer’s role as cultural commentator.

Several photographs in this exhibition ostensibly adopt a traditional documentary approach, but elsewhere there is an idiosyncratic strategy at work which transcends mere chronicling. In Instant Identity Photos (all works 2006 – 2007), a crowd of stony-faced people wait for a bus. Behind them decrepit buildings where local businesses once operated stand empty and abandoned. Perhaps for Jurisic the anticipation of the bus’s arrival connotes a community waiting patiently for change, or even dreaming of being transported to a different life.

The Irish government’s definition of poverty includes those whose “income and resources (material, cultural and social) are so inadequate as to preclude them from having a standard of living which is regarded as acceptable by Irish society generally.” Whether or not this definition describes any of the people in this mundane scene is uncertain, but the term ‘poverty stricken’ certainly doesn’t spring to mind; it’s a poor area for sure, but no one appears destitute and several people are carrying shopping bags. The ambiguity of this piece leaves viewers slightly adrift as to Jurisic’s intentions.

In contrast, (Pissing on) the heart of the city features a police horse, reliving itself in a shabby, dilapidated street. Attached to a crumbling building and bearing the titular phrase, an advert for Guinness looms large behind. The work’s implicit critique points the finger towards the authorities responsible for allowing this urban decay. Unlike other less politicised works here, it speaks directly and uncompromisingly to the issues at hand and as a result is one of the exhibition’s strongest inclusions.

Taken from a high vantage point And the tree just stood there is an aerial view of a decaying car park. A white dove soars high above the cars, unseen by the people bellow. The bird’s presence may initially appear adventitious, but for Jurisic it is an important recurring motif. In One crow for sorrow a jet-black crow swoops across a misty urban scene: far from incidental, Jurisic trains her lens on the bird, making it the subject, while leaving an out of focus woman in the street behind to meld in with a vaporous scenery.

Jurisic’s birds function as a metaphor for the photographer’s presence and, by extension, Jurisic herself: birds are free to come and go as they wish, observing from afar, and so too are photographers who – often unlike their subjects – can leave the situation they document whenever they wish. Strongly influenced by the polemics of Susan Sontag, Jurisic suscribes to her assertion in On Photography, 1977, that “the habit of photographic seeing – of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.” Jurisic has felt this estrangement and has spoken of her discomfort at working on this project – even referring to her camera as a shield, protecting her from the subject.

The estrangement is alluded to in Pigeon house, a dense, foggy scene overlooking a grey expanse overlooking a grey expanse of water. In the distance, through the mist, are nebulous signs of an industrial presence. Towards the foreground, perched on some small rocks jutting out of the water are several birds, detached from and oblivious to the distant conurbation. This dreamy, wistful scene is perhaps emblematic of the psychological gulf between rich and poor, or between the artist and her subject.

Jurisic’s evocative images invite contemplation and though they do not explicitly represent poverty in Ireland, her use of metaphor to draw underlying narratives to the surface is extremely engaging. Despite the lack of an incisive critical vision, Jurisic’s strength lies in a keen eye for finding poetry in the mundane. By making her own unease the real subject of this exhibition, viewers are in turn challenged to examine their own attitudes towards an uncomfortable and often neglected problem.

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Croatian born photographer, Dragana Jurisic stand-out contribution to the University of Wales, Newport final degree show for the MFA in Documentary Photography is two-fold.

One framed work in an exhibition at Ffotogallery, Penarth, and a publication profiling her recent, more expansive body of photographic works.

At Ffotogallery, a single work nestles amongst the many and varied contributions to the group show - in the stairwell between ground and first-floor. The misty urban scene captured by Jurisic's poetic eye is like any grey Dublin day (she moved there from Croatia in 1999), except for the ominous presence of a large black crow that hovers in the centre of the image; threatening to attack; to penetrate your personal space.

Her second and more expansive contribution to the show is the publication 'Seeing Things'. In 2006 she was commissioned by Combat Poverty, an Irish State Agency to produce a body of work that could be used to raise awareness of the underlying poverty in Ireland in a period of rapid change. The resulting body of works – which sadly are not exhibited here – blend sharp detail with documentary detachment to create a poignant realism that calls into question the photographer’s role as cultural commentator and our own basic assumptions about the nature of truth and objectivity. (Hannah Firth, 2009)

Croatian photographer DRAGANA JURISIC has assembled a stunning body of work.

WORDS Helena Mulkerns

Random images: rainy-pavement Moore Street as a Chinese man lights a cigarette among the vegetable debris; a man’s hand crunched onto a steel hospital crutch that bears the word “sunrise”; an empty bar with sunlight spewing in a window, falling on a crumpled tee-shirt.

Just some of the moments captured by photographer Dragana Jurisic, Croatian by birth and Dubliner by chance, after she visited Ireland nine years ago , and ended up staying. Her photography is visceral, emotive and yet detached: she wants to embrace a scene and delver it back, in all its glorious and tawdry detail, for the viewer to savour or dismiss. She does not mind which because it’s what she does, regardless.

“It’s a way of ordering the chaos”, she says, intense dark eyes scanning the horizon over Dublin Bay. “Very emotional scenes can be placed into something that is in a way, orderly. It’s making sense of the world by taking certain moment out of it.”

Dragana’s work can be seen on her website (draganajurisic.com), her blog (photoblog.com/Dragana) and a stunning book she published last November, entitled Seeing Things. Now, a year later, she’s planning to re-launch a revised version of the book, in a limited edition that she envisages as an artwork in itself.

The availability of her work online is something that many artists would shy from, but she sees it as a natural process: “There is no sense in being proprietary about photos. I take them, but I want to share them. When you take a photo, you have to be able to put it out in the world without getting something back from it.”

Dragana comes to photography naturally, since her father was also a snapper.

“I was about six or seven when my father showed me how to work in the dark room,” she remembers. But when a bomb fell on the family house in Croatia and destroyed most of her father’s work in one flaming swoop, that changed. “he took one more picture after that – a photo of our house after it had burned down – for insurance purposes: but that was about it. He never photographed again. It was as if I began to take photos when he stopped.”

Dragana studied Psychology as her undergraduate degree. Interestingly, it was in the Croatian student psychology publication, Kacot, an anti-establishment review, that her photos were first published. She eventually left Croatia for Prague when she was 23 and from there found herself in Dublin in 1999. Graduating wit a Master’s in Photography from Newport University in Wales, she was commissioned in 2006 by Ireland’s Combat Poverty agency to document the subject of poverty in Ireland. This resulted in a stunning body of work that blends poignant detail with documentary objectivity, charting a Dublin that the Celtic Tiger would prefer to brush under its expensive new veneer. With their stark realism, Dragana’s works remind us not to get too complacent.

She has exhibited in group shows in the UK, Wales and Ireland, and is currently absorbed with a number of projects, including a solo show for 2009.

She stands on the edge of the pier in Dun Laoghaire, near where she lives, and contemplates a velvet autumnal seascape. The end of summer reminds her of the first day of war in her homeland, when she was evacuated, along with her neighbours, into a shopping mall where the evacuees’ only respite was lightweight looting of the shops.

“I remember sipping champagne, and sharing a makeshift bed with a boy I had a crush on, while we watched the ‘fireworkes’ of the city under fire,” she says. “It’s a funny thing the way you remember the happier moments from that time – despite what was happening. If you couldn’t do that, than I think you would go mad.”

Perhaps it’s this that has prompted her to find the poetry of places that most people pass without noticing, to seeing the emotion in the details of daily existence.

“In a way,” she notes, |”photography is like writing with light … one frame transfers the emotion of that moment.”